Recent years have seen the deployment of a variety of different access standards for use in wireless networks (e.g., GSM, CDMA, WCDMA, IEEE-801.16, etc.). However, the proliferation of wireless access standards has proven to be inconvenient and challenging for the manufacturers of wireless mobile stations (or terminal), such as cell phones, PDA devices, wireless laptops, and the like. End-user expectations of a ubiquitous network cannot be met with mobile stations that support only a subset of the possible standards.
In response, wireless mobile stations are transitioning to software-defined radio (SDR) architectures to provide common hardware platforms for multiple air interface technologies. The continual improvement of semiconductor process technology has enabled an increasingly greater percentage of the signal processing functions in a mobile station (or wireless terminal) to be performed by reconfigurable hardware. The reconfigurable hardware may take one of several forms, including fixed functional blocks with customizable parameters and flexible interconnects. The reconfigurable hardware may be implemented, for example, in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).
While fully configurable devices such as field programmable gate arrays currently have issues related to power and cost, the evolution in process and architecture technology is likely to overcome these limitations in time. However, within a software-refined radio (SDR) system, it is expensive and wasteful to store in memory all of the possible configuration files that the mobile station is likely to need.
To avoid such large memories, a user may transport the mobile station to a wireless service center and have the mobile station configuration software installed through cabling when needed. As users travel from one geographical region to another region that is served by a different wireless standard, a similar paradigm of reconfiguration for hardware is frustrating to the user and costly to wireless service providers.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a multi-mode mobile station that is capable of being reconfigured to operate according to a variety of air interface standards. More particularly, there is a need for a multi-mode mobile station that does not require a large memory of storing a large number of configuration files.